Can you really set out to change how you view the world? Does it work, can it be a good thing to decide that it’s time for a change or that your current view is no longer serving you? How do you find a system that reflects not only the reality you see, but the one you wish to see? I’ve unwittingly been a study of that question for over a decade, and it has recently come to a serious no-turning-back point. I want to talk about the process of the change, and the different ways it has happened over that time.
First, I came to the conclusion that change was needed. This year marks seven years since I cut contact with my family of origin and left fundamentalist Christianity, abandoning the “worldview” required by both. Before that, I had spent several years trying to make sense of the world I encountered outside my family of origin, dazed by the dissonance between what I’d been told and what I actually saw. My original worldview was crafted for me by a relatively small number of cishet white men (plus one token black preacher), and the far-right reaches of the Republican party. And honestly, that’s pretty true of most people in the West if you think about it. Mine just happened to be more extreme, and once it was handed to my parents they abused me into adopting it.
I discovered truths about myself and the world which could not fit the worldview I was born into. My old world answered by telling me what I saw was simply wrong. But every test I ran showed me that if I was to trust my own thoughts and experiences at all, I could not accept the old world’s answers.
“Changing your mind means, I said I’d never do this, and here I am doing it.”
Terrance McKenna
So, leaving behind what could no longer hold water, I began learning about my options. I explored some wide-spread religions, philosophies of life, lifestyles, perspectives. I figured out what people actually meant by capitalism vs socialism, racism, “eco-friendly,” how poverty functions, and what it meant to be queer. Spiritual depth returned via Judaism, chaos magic, and a constellation of related practices. Philosophically I played between nihilism and existentialism, but always held Buber’s I and Thou out ahead of me as a warm light to reach for (and as an antidote to the tempting slide of nihilism which for me was an unhealthy conclusion).
These stepping stones and more gave me structures to hold up my life as I continued deconstructing the ones I’d been handed. But after years of the process, I would still bemoan my lack of what I called my “organizing principle.” All the sub-beliefs which I found to align with what I saw of the world didn’t have a central body around which to orbit.
I finally began wondering how to change enough that I could find happiness. Most of the ideas I researched made me small, powerless, without purpose, or destined to merely fade away into nothingness. At best they made me a future ancestor, or a sliver of a greater, more permanent being going through incarnation as a sandbox in which to play. Never my own, purposeful self here, now, in this lifetime.
At great length, I sat and considered what I wanted. It feels so silly to say it in simple terms, but I accepted a worldview in which what I most deeply desire is true. And the universe started handing it to me, or I started finding it, or making it. I wanted love. I wanted home. I wanted to help others in a deep, abiding way. I wanted to learn and learn and learn. So I started.
My “organizing principle” became my own values.
I never expected a worldview like what I’ve begun to settle on. A philosophy that encompasses simply what I want out of life, and can hand it to me. It has shocked me and changed everything in my life for the better. I could call it magic or observational bias, “choosing joy” or the will to be happy. None of those are satisfactory terms.
“I’m trying to get you to think. You know what that is? It’s just a fancy word for ‘changing your mind.’”
The Twelfth Doctor
The one thing I’ve distilled from it, is that it is the worldview that allows for me to be who and what I am, and allows you to be too. For me it looks like a bunch of specific disparate parts that work for me. For you it looks like the parts that make your life match who you are.
In short, it is MY worldview, the view from my truest self, which allows me to interact with all these other beautiful human persons who all have THEIR own view.
I believe that is how we change our mind, change our worldview. We find ourselves, we find our environment, then we take and enjoy them.
I call my specific system Gaianic Humanism. I enjoy ideological disciplines enough to want to flesh it out and hold it up as a model others can iterate on. But I don’t expect it to be anyone else’s. I merely hope it helps other people see a direction they can head on their way to being who they are.
You change your mind by letting your mind become what it is instead of what was painted overtop of it. Models are merely models. You are the truest viewpoint you can ever view, you are the emotions you most want to experience, you are the experience you most desire to have.